Let’s face it: sometimes life can be stressful. In fact, for some of us it often feels like moving from  one stressful situation to another with small periods of calm in between. Having good emotion regulation skills helps us manage stressful situations in life.  Distress tolerance skills are an important part of emotion regulation skills; they’re the skills we use when we’re confronted with highly stressful situations.  While many people have good distress tolerance skills, others may struggle with managing stress in healthy ways.

Developing strong distress tolerance skills can be critical to helping someone cope with difficult situations without responding in a self-destructive manner. 

Understanding Distress Tolerance

Distress tolerance is the capability to manage highly stressful circumstances in life that can also be frustrating. While low frustration tolerance can occur for many people occasionally, some people struggle more with reacting in unhealthy ways to stressful situations.

Examples of low distress tolerance can be someone who is self-harming or self-sabotaging. They tend to use unhealthy coping mechanisms that provide temporary emotional relief but cause distressing emotions to return stronger and more upsetting in the long run.  Often, the unhealthy coping mechanisms end up causing new problems. 

For example, someone may have a fight with a romantic partner, might feel angry, rejected, overwhelmed and respond by excessive drinking or bombarding their partner with angry texts. 

Another example is when we’re feeling overwhelmed by work stress, we’re pressed for time, so stress-eating becomes a quick escape, we end up using food as a go-to coping mechanism and don’t work on learning other ways of coping. 

It’s common for someone with a low distress tolerance level to make matters worse and sabotage their circumstances. 

What does Good Distress Tolerance Look Like? 

Good distress tolerance means being able to step back in overwhelming situations, regulate your emotions, make healthy choices, and communicate your feelings clearly and assertively.  Engaging in these behaviors helps us to make adaptive choices and to maintain healthy relationships. 

Sometimes, people think managing stress effectively means you shouldn’t have emotions or you should learn to control your emotions.  But emotions are natural and often a valuable source of information. And in the face of stressful situations, they can feel overwhelming for many of us.  Having good distress tolerance skills doesn’t mean you don’t encounter challenging situations or that you don’t feel your emotions strongly. People with good distress tolerance skills use their skills  to engage in behaviors that help them cope with overwhelming emotions in the moment, make choices that align with their values and build the life they want. 

How to Increase Distress Tolerance

Fortunately, there are some basic distress tolerance skills that you can practice using to help you in stressful situations: 

Take a deep breath

This may seem like common sense, but often, breathing can become shallow and unproductive in stressful situations. Deep breathing or box breathing can help return breath to normal as well as calm the nervous system.  Emotions like anger and anxiety have physiological changes that accompany them e.g., (increases in heart rate and body temperature).  Deep breathing targets these physiological changes, thus decreasing our perception of how intense the emotion is.  This in turn helps us to feel less overwhelmed, think more clearly, and make better choices. 

Use Your 5 Senses

It’s important to ground yourself with your five senses and tap into how you’re feeling and what you’re experiencing in the moment. This helps you to step back from racing thoughts and overwhelming emotions.  Look around you (what do you hear? What do you smell? What do you hear? Touch something and pay attention to the texture and temperature. Focusing on the present moment helps you to step back from overwhelming thoughts and feelings, enabling you to make better choices and avoid poor ones. 

STOP 

Take a moment  Literally, stop and don’t do anything. Often, when we act quickly, it’s out of pure emotion and  it may not be the most helpful response. Try to step away if you can. If you can’t,  take a deep breath. Check in with yourself. What are you feeling? What are you thinking? These questions help to ground you and slow down your decision-making. Consider the situation: What are the facts? Other people’s perspectives? Other people’s feelings?  What are your goals? Choose mindfully. 

Take a vacation

When you’re feeling overwhelmed, take a vacation. It sounds strange but this is a form of visualization, a helpful skill for coping when we feel overwhelmed. Picture somewhere relaxing (e.g., a beach or a place in nature) you’ve been or are very familiar with and go there in your head. Picture, the sounds, the smells, the sights and any relevant  textures of the location. The more real you can make it, the more of your senses you can involve, the more effective the visualization will be at helping you regulate your emotions. 

If you find you’re struggling on a regular basis with overwhelming emotions and making unhealthy choices when you feel overwhelmed, it may be time to reach out to a therapist. A trained therapist can work with you to develop better distress tolerance skills. 

About: Chanderbhan Psychological Services is a therapy practice located in Laredo, Texas. We help individuals and couples who are struggling in different areas of their lives gain the clarity they need to grow and change. We also offer telehealth to individuals located in the wider State of Texas.  To read blogs on mental health and relationships, visit our website.